The institute is now called the Bernhard Nocht Institute for Tropical Medicine.
Fritz Schumacher, Stufen den Lebens, 297; quoted in Jennifer Jenkins, Provincial Modernity: Local Culture and Liberal Politics in Fin-de-Siècle Hamburg (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2018), 277.
Hamburg Deutscher Architekten und Ingenieur-Vereine (Hamburg Association of German Architects and Engineers), Hamburg und seine Bauten: unter Berücksichtigung der Nachbarstädte Altona und Wandsbek 1914, vol. 1, ed. Merckel (Hamburg: Bonsen und Maasch, 1914).
Bernhard Nocht, “Das Neue Institut Für Schiffs- und Tropenkrankheiten,” Beihefte zum Archiv für Schiffs- und Tropen-Hygiene unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der Pathologie und Therapie 18, no. 5 (May 1914): 8–25.
In his keynote speech at the inaugural meeting of the Deutscher Werkbund in 1907, Schumacher made a case for bolstering the national economy through aesthetics and architecture. “Everything that can be imitated soon loses its value on the international market; only the qualitative values which spring from the inexpressible inner powers of a harmonious culture are inimitable. And consequently there exists in aesthetic power also the highest economic value. After a century devoted to technique and thought, we see the next project which Germany has to fulfill as that of the reconquest of a harmonious culture.” Fritz Schumacher, “Speech at the founding of the Deutscher Werkbund, Munich 1907,” Die Form 7, no. 11 (1932): 330–331. Translation from Ben Farmer, Hentie J. Louw, and Adrian Napper, Companion to Contemporary Architectural Thought (London: Routledge, 1993), 463.
Fritz Schumacher, Grundlagen der Baukunst: Studien zum Beruf des Architekten (Munich: Callwey, 1916), 187.
Fritz Schumacher, “Das Wesen des neuzeitlichen Backsteinbaues, Teil 1: Zur Ästhetik des Backsteinbaues” (Munich, 1920); quoted in Dorothea Roos and Friedmar Voormann, Hamburger Backstein- und Klinkerbauten: Gestalt, Konstruktion, Material (Karlsruhe: KIT Scientific Publishing, 2011), 184. Italics added.
On Schumacher’s work with brick manufacturing, see Jakob Julius Scharvogel, “Neuer Hamburger Backsteinbau,” Dekorative Kunst 20 (1917): 337–346; and Hermann Muthesius, “Fritz Schumachers Bautätigkeit in Hamburg,” Dekorative Kunst 27 (1919): 93–97; both found in Roos and Voormann, Hamburger Backstein- und Klinkerbauten, 171–174.
Fritz Schumacher, “Farbige Architektur,” 1900; in Streifzüge eines Architekten (Jena, 1907), 117–124; found in Roos and Voormann, Hamburger Backstein- und Klinkerbauten, 157.
Muthesius, “Fritz Schumachers Bautätigkeit in Hamburg,” 93–97; found in Roos and Voormann, Hamburger Backstein- und Klinkerbauten, 174.
Schumacher, “Das Wesen des neuzeitlichen Backsteinbaues,” quoted in Roos and Voormann, Hamburger Backstein- und Klinkerbauten, 178.
Caroline Hero et al., UNESCO World Heritage Nomination Dossier: The Speicherstadt and Chilehaus (Hamburg: Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg, Ministry of Culture/Department for Historic Preservation, 2015), ➝.
“By 1892 Neustadt Sud had the greatest number of accommodations with rent below 300 marks a year, and neighboring parts of town St. Pauli, Neustadt Nord, Altstadt Nort, St. George Nord und Sud had the greatest amount of lodgers per household,” and in the 1890s, almost 70% of the population was below the poverty line. See Richard J. Evans, Death in Hamburg: Society and Politics in the Cholera Years 1830–1910 (New York: Penguin Group USA, 1990), 70–73.
Refer to text and Map 33, “Cholera mortality rate, by district, Hamburg 1892,” in Evans, Death in Hamburg, 420–428.
The Port Medical Service was established immediately after the 1892 cholera epidemic. By 1895 the St. George hospital in Hamburg had 25 beds reserved for “internally ill seafarers”—the “internal” descriptor suggesting travelers and sailors who were European and likely white. When the ISTK was established in 1900 it took on the role of treating seafarers with diseases classified as tropical. Sven Tode and Kathrin Kompisch, “Forschen—Heilen—Lehren: 100 Jahre Hamburger Tropeninstitut,” in Bernhard-Nocht-Institut für Tropenmedizin 1900–2000, eds. Tode and Kompisch (Hamburg: Bernhard-Nocht-Institut für Tropenmedizin, 2000), 8.
After Patrick Manson’s book Manson's Tropical Diseases: a Manual of the Diseases of Warm Climates (1898) was published, and new institutions in Liverpool (1898) and London (1899) were established. Note that the Hamburg ISTK was not the first hospital treating what were classified at the time as “tropical diseases.” Patrick Manson was involved in the founding of the Hong Kong College of Medicine in 1887, which had built a series of hospitals to treat local patients with diseases classified as tropical, using Western techniques. See Plague, SARS and the Story of Medicine in Hong Kong, ed. Arthur Starling (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2006).
Arnulf Scriba, “Statistische Angaben zu den deutschen Kolonien,” Deutsches Historisches Museum, September 17, 2014, ➝.
Beihefte zum Archiv für Schiffs- und Tropen-Hygiene unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der Pathologie und Therapie, 1897–1898, vols. 1–2, ed. Dr C. Mense (Leipzig: J.A. Barth, 1898), 3–4.
Harish Naraindas gives an excellent account of how putrefaction, or the rate at which organic material decomposes in varying climates, formed a basis for this medical pathologization. See Harish Naraindas, “Poisons, Putrescence and the Weather: A Genealogy of the Advent of Tropical Medicine,” Contributions to Indian Sociology 30, no. 1 (1996): 1–35.
Cholera, for example, had been present in both India and Europe since the early 1800s.
Nocht, “Das Neue Institut,” 8–25.
As such, Naraindas argues that the discipline of Tropical Medicine “in a ‘scientific’ sense, was obsolete at the very moment of its founding.” While this may have been epistemologically true, the field nevertheless continued to operate under the aegis of its descriptor “Tropical.” Narindas uses this statement to argue that Tropical Medicine, and “climate” as its operative term, must be seen as a mechanism of “global pathologization.” Naraindas, “Poisons, Putrescence and the Weather,” 1–35. Naraindas quotes Patrick Manson (1898) on page 2.
For standards of architectural hygiene in Europe, see Banister Flight Fletcher and Herbert Phillips Fletcher, Architectural Hygiene: Or, Sanitary Science as Applied to Buildings: A Textbook (London: Whittaker & Company, 1911), 189–190. Though perched on a bank with steep elevation change, the site was leveled into a platform for the building, so that the ground line was consistent around the entire façade, allowing windows below the raised ground floor to pull in air at the basement level. Concern for ventilation in all three of the buildings is perhaps one reason why the main floor is lifted up off the street front, even though this would seem to make it difficult to unload a person from the ambulance to the building in order to carry them into the hospital.
Nocht, “Das Neue Institut,” 8–25.
Deutsches Kolonial Lexikon, vols. 1–3, ed. Heinrich Schnee (Leipzig: Quelle & Meyer, 1920). A photograph of the Hamburg Institute for Tropical Medicine is included in this book.
The Deutsches Kolonial Lexikon has been digitized as part of the Archives of the German Colonial Society by the University Library of Frankfurt am Main. Der Bildbestand der Deutschen Kolonialgesellschaft in der Universitätsbibliothek Frankfurt am Main, ➝.
The construction of an animal house was perceived as particularly important for the ISTK to advance its research. Previous facilities had not had enough space. “Tropical pathology can only be carried out successfully if the study extends to people and animals at the same time, whose diseases in the tropics are closely related.” See Hamburg und seine Bauten, 320.
The first publication on Vitralin appears to be Xylander, “Vitralin, eine desinfizierende Anstrichfarbe. Arbeiten aus dem Kaiserl,” Gesundheitsamte 29, no. 1 (1908).
Hüne, “Beitrag zur Hygiene der Wandanstriche,” Zeitschrift für Hygiene und Infektionskrankheiten, medizinische Mikrobiologie, Immunologie und Virologie 69, no. 1 (1911): 243–66, 244.
“A New Enemy to Germs,” The Chicago Medical Recorder 31, no. 9 (1909).
“The work done in America, Germany, and elsewhere, showing that volatile liquids generally have most deleterious effects on health seems to be recognized only in narrow circles.” Henry E. Armstrong, “Lead Poisoning and the International Labour Conference,” British Medical Journal 2, no. 3181 (1921): 1042.
